Borderlands 2 - Interview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Randy Pitchford chats with Rock, Paper, Shotgun about Borderlands 2:

RPS: I noticed you picking it up and playing it yourself earlier, and thought ‘that’s probably a good sign’.

Randy Pitchford: That particular build we had today, we were running the PC version, and I was checking some things. We have a custom version we’ve developed with NVIDIA, so if you have an NVIDIA card, especially one of the newer ones, you can get crazy awesome physics simulations, cloth simulation, fluid dynamics, really cool stuff. Mostly cosmetic but still rad to look at nonetheless. And then once I was in there I started looking at other things. I hadn’t looked at the full day/night cycle shading in that corner of that environment yet, so I was watching the moon turn.

I actually created the physics for the way the planet works, and the planet has this elliptical orbit around its star. The habitable side of the planet actually faces against the star, so you don’t actually see the sun, ever. Meanwhile the moon has this sort of geo-synchronous position in the sky, so it’s always in the same spot in the sky. The moon has a crazy fast rotation, it takes about 20 minutes for it to spin. One side of the moon is a furnace, like a nuclear furnace, where it’s reacting and it’s super-hot, and it splashes a lot of extra light onto the planet. On the other side it’s very cold and dark, and so when the moon spins, when the hot reactive side warms up the atmosphere and it gets hot, it feels lighter outside. When you get the cold side it’s not dark, because you’re getting the ambient light from the nearby star, but it gets dim, with a sort of cold feeling, and you can also see these beautiful auroras in the sky. From that particular position I hadn’t actually looked at the light cycle from the moon spinning, and I was checking that out, so that’s what I was doing down there.